City Beautiful

• A transformation movement in North American architecture and urban planning that grew in 1890 and 1900.

• Beaux-arts and neoclassical architectures.

• World Columbian Exposition

• Industrial Revolution

ORIGIN

• Burnham believed that a city needed a grand entrance and that was the railway depot.

• The grand boulevard was justified as a solution to traffic problems encountered by suburban commuters and a way to provide housing for higher income people in the city.

The Grand Boulevard

• Burnham also wanted all the bridges over the rivers rebuilt to be more attractive.

• The wall to wall development of mansard roofed apartments he foresaw in the city contrasted sharply with the single family homes in the existing neighborhoods. He dismissed these structures as a great solution for small towns but not a good solution to the needs of the regional capital.

GOALS AND OBJECTIVES

• To introduce beautification and monumental grandeur in cities.

• To sweep away social ills

• To have a cultural resemblance with their European competitors through the use of Beaux-Arts Idioms.

• To prevent upper classes back to live, but to work and spend money in the urban zone.

CITY BEAUTIFUL IN THE PHILIPPINES

CITY BEAUTIFUL IN THE PHILIPPINES • Manila

Department of Tourism. Copied from Washington D.C.

Post Office. American-Style postal service

CITY BEAUTIFUL IN THE PHILIPPINES

• Baguio City

- “…the parkway will be separated from the mainland by lagoons, to be used for boating, rowing, and pleasure craft.”

DECLINE

• The movement weakened in 1909 because planners and critics find it expensive and impractical and disliked its obviously discriminatory and artificial characteristics.

• Burnham's plan was never implemented, and the real estate companies built a city that would yield high profits, adopting the skyscraper design and technology developed in Chicago by Sullivan and others.

Introduction

• Conceptualized by Frank Lloyd Wright (1932-1959)

• vision of multi-centered, low density (supposedly 5 people per acre), auto-oriented suburbia

• each family would be given one acre (4,000 m2) from the federal land reserves

• Land would be taken into public ownership; then granted to families for as long as they used it productively.

• 12 x 12 ft. model that illustrated the Broadacre City concept as it might be applied to a representative 4 miles2 plot of land.

• ‘Usonia’ was based not on cooperation but fierce individualism.

• "romantic isolation and reunion with the soil" (Lewis Mumford)

Origin

• because of technological advancements, Wright came to believe that the large, centralized city would soon become obsolete and people would return to their rural roots.

• Wright despised the city, both physically and metaphorically

Aspects of Broadacre City that became realities

• Prevalence of urban sprawl

• Modern suburbia may have many differences with Broadacre, but there are also many similarities.

• single-family homes on larger parcels of land with smaller roads connecting to larger roads connecting to freeways.

• Being able to own land, build a home, and do what you please with it were important in Broadacre City .

• Wright believed that modern man had the right to own a car and to burn as much gasoline in driving it as he desired.

• The City Plan

• Agrarian Urbanism

Goals and Objectives

• Broadacre City each family is give one acre (4.000 m2) of land on which to build a house and grow food. The city was considered to be (almost) fully self-sufficient.

• “more light, more freedom of movement and a more general spatial freedom in the ideal establishment of what we call civilization.”

Failures and Disadvantages

• Too real to be Utopian and too dreamlike to be of practical importance.

• demands motor transportation for even the most casual or ephemeral meetings

• didn’t see the large population increase from 2B in 1930 -7B present time, increase in fuel prices, environmental repercussions

Lessons from the Broadacre City

• Urban sprawl has become a reality

• Decentralization, both physically and economically; being more independent.

• American Dream: land and home ownership

References:

• http://xroads.virginia.edu/~cap/citybeautiful/city.html

• http://www.greatmirror.com/index.cfm?navid=904